NEH & North Carolina

Between 2006 and 2010, institutions and individuals in North Carolina received $14.8 million from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the North Carolina Humanities Council for projects that explore the human endeavor and preserve our cultural heritage. Below are some examples.

Scholars at the National Humanities Center outside Durham are using a $200,000 award to develop an online library of documents and artifacts called Making the Revolution: America 1763-1791 to help teachers and students address themes such as the formation of an American way of life and the consolidation of the Revolution.

Just before the Civil War, there were 500,000 free blacks in the United States. Thomas Day, a successful furniture-maker and businessman in North Carolina, was one. A $96,000 grant enabled thirty schoolteachers to attend a two-week institute focusing on Day and other African-American entrepreneurs of the antebellum era.

Mars Hill College received a $400,000 challenge grant toward an endowment that would support a full-time director/archivist and programming for its Southern Appalachian Archives, which includes Cherokee artifacts, documents relating to local farm life from the 1920s to the 1950s, and a famed collection of mountain music recordings.

The North Carolina Humanities Council is arranging for New Harmonies: Celebrating American Roots Music, a traveling Smithsonian exhibit overseen by a North Carolina folklife scholar Beverly Patterson, to visit six locations throughout the state.

A $70,000 grant helped bring together fifty K-12 teachers for a two-day scholarly conference at Appalachian State University in Boone on the perennial question, “What is American about American art?” The program enabled teachers to integrate art into core courses.

For more than twenty-five years the North Carolina Humanities Council has sponsored weekend seminars at which K-12 schoolteachers can engage in graduate-level study.

The Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte received $5,000 to help pay for a conservation assessment of its collection of American paintings, which includes works by George Bellows and Thomas Cole.

Martha Jefferson Randolph, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, married a future governor and raised sons who fought on both sides of the Civil War. Her biography is being researched and written by Cynthia Anne Kierner at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, thanks to a $50,000 research fellowship.

Preserving the Pamlico County African American Experience History Project 1920-1965 was supported by two grants from the North Carolina Humanities Council. Participants received training to conduct oral history interviews.